A Bad Plan Is Better Than No Plan At All

When the world comes crashing around us, there’s often not enough time or presence of mind to come up with the even most basic response. If you have a bad plan, you’re off to a head start when compared to the version of you who doesn’t have a plan.

Consider stuff that is bad enough to throw you off-balance, temporarily disabling your capacity to plan how to deal with it on the spot. Some things that usually make people crash:

— Death (of a child, a parent, a spouse).

— Loss of job/bankruptcy (of yourself, your spouse, a parent, or close family member)

— Serious illness or accident resulting in disability of some sort.

It might be grim, but thinking about these things needn’t depress you. Paradoxically, you might feel that having considered them in advance and having decided on a course of action reduces anxiety about them by some measure.

And don’t let the planning consume you. There’s no such thing as a perfect plan. The point is that a bad plan is better than no plan. Unless the dreaded event is something that you see as being increasingly certain, content yourself with formulating a first step, and leave it at that.